


in my end is my beginning

by myaimistrue



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Blood and Violence, Colonist Shepard, F/M, Gen, Home, Mindoir, Minor Character Death, Minor Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard, Shepard's Family - Freeform, Shepard's Past, lots of my own conjecture about her past, working through shepard's issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:07:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25517767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myaimistrue/pseuds/myaimistrue
Summary: Shepard thinks about Mindoir.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko/Female Shepard
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Quote Prompt Memes





	in my end is my beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [Coeurire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coeurire/pseuds/Coeurire) in the [quoteonlyprompts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/quoteonlyprompts) collection. 



> Prompt:
> 
> "I just want to go home."

Everyone is concerned for you. Your crew keeps asking how they can help. You catch your closest friends watching you with worried expressions. You wish they wouldn’t, and you tell them all that you’re fine, because you are, as much as you can be; you came to terms with the reality of this fight a long time ago. The Reapers’ destruction isn’t shocking to you, and the likelihood of your own death because of it isn’t shocking either. Against all the odds, you’ve pulled together a galaxy, and given everything you can to do it; you’re fully prepared to give your life too, as terrifying as it may be.

The strange thing, however, is your recent fixation on your home planet and your past there. When you’re not having nightmares about dead people, about failing and never being able to save anyone in time, you have long, meandering dreams about your childhood. You relive memories that you haven’t thought about in years: the time you and Will decided to try smoking and your father caught you both coughing your lungs out in the barn with the pack of cigarettes at your feet, the time you tried to run away from home at the tender age of six and made it as far as the silo before running back, the time you attempted to bake a cake for your mother’s birthday and nearly burnt your house to the ground. Countless little memories, unimportant but tangible, all those moments that built you up into yourself.

You catch yourself daydreaming all the time. So rarely have you ever allowed yourself to think about Mindoir and the things that happened there. For a long time, it was a survival tactic; if you thought about it too much, you’d never be able to move forward, so you tried not to think about it all. Now, though, the floodgates have been opened, and you can’t seem to stop them.

You think about Will, mostly. Your older brother, your intelligent and funny and incredible older brother. The two of you, separated in age by less than a year, were inseparable your whole lives, perpetually getting into trouble. When you think about the things the two of you got up to, your own insane and occasionally reckless actions in your military career seem to make a little more sense.

The two of you used to lay in the field beside the big barn for hours, staring up at the pale, pale blue of the Mindoir sky. He’d carve little trinkets out of wood scraps, and you’d count all the visible planets, going over every detail you knew about them.

“I’m going to see the entire universe, Will.”

He would always laugh at that. “And leave me with the farm? I don’t think so.”

“You’re good with the crops!” You would protest.

“I’m also the oldest. I’m getting off this colony first, and then I’m sticking you with the farm.”

But that was all just talk. You knew from a young age that your life would go far beyond the little colony you were born on, but Will never really wanted that for himself. You think that if the slavers never came, he probably would have had a wonderful life on Mindoir. He’d take care of the farm and your parents; by now, he’d probably have a family of his own. You wonder how many kids he’d have, what his wife would be like.

You wish you’d have gotten to see him grow up and your parents grow old. Mom and Dad were so young when they died. They were so young when the slavers broke down the door to your house, when your mother shoved your family’s only gun into your hands (you were always the best shot) and told you and Will to run, when you heard their screams echo as you sprinted away through the cornfield. 

The two weeks after that are a blur, and you’re grateful, really, not to remember most of it. The only clear memory you have from that terrible time is when Will died on the fourth day. You had found what you both thought was an abandoned house to hole up in- it wasn’t. There was a terrified man, traumatized and frantic because of what he had seen, unable to comprehend that neither you nor Will were Batarian slavers. You shot him clean between the eyes, your very first kill, but it was too late; Will had already taken a bullet in the neck. You held your brother in your arms as his mouth moved wordlessly and desperately, as his blood spilled all over the both of you. You couldn’t even bury him because the gunfire had drawn the attention of the slavers. You had left him there beside his killer and ran away as fast as you could.

When the Alliance Marines finally found you, you were nearly feral, malnourished and beaten up and still clutching the gun your mother had given you fifteen days earlier. They gently took the weapon from your hands, they gave you food and water, and the next morning, you boarded one of the very last ships to evacuate Mindoir. You made it out just in time.

You remember staring out the window as your home planet grew more and more distant. You didn’t know it then, but you wouldn’t be back there for nearly ten years on one of your first N7 missions, all your festering wounds turned to scars. You had actively avoided the places you were familiar with, but what you did see was so dramatically different than it had been before the attack. Rebuilt and repopulated, Mindoir seemed to be a sparkling new colony, a far more perfect version of the place of your birth.

Now, you doubt you’ll ever set foot on Mindoir again. You had always thought you’d make your way back at some point, when the dust in your life had settled, and walk through whatever was left of the farm. Maybe it had been rebuilt. Maybe some other family was living there, sleeping in the house you once did. You wish you knew what had become of it.

It bothers you. You’ve made sure that all the loose ends in your life are tied up; nothing has been left unsaid, nothing is uncertain, but your family and your home are a story without an ending. They died, and you left, but there is no closure.

The only person you talk to about it, the only person you ever really talk to about your family, is Kaidan. He asks you one night, when you’re lying in bed together, what you need to get through this time. You tell him what you’ve told everybody: that you don’t need anything, that you’ve done all you can and know it, that you’re alright.

But Kaidan knows you better than any of them. He looks at you. “Shepard, if you don’t need anything, then what do you  _ want _ ?”

It catches you off guard. What do you want? Commander Shepard, the woman who has brought a galaxy together, who kills Reapers, who is more than ready to face her own death to save everyone else- what do you want?

You look up at the skylight, at the stars and planets rushing by like little pinpricks. “I…”

“Shepard?”

“I just want to go home.” It sounds childlike, it sounds wildly embarrassing, but you say it, and it’s out there in the open. “To go back to Mindoir. I just want to see it again, one last time.”

“You will,” Kaidan says softly. “When all of this is over, you’ll go back there. I’ll come with you, if you want.”

It breaks your heart when he says that, because you both know it isn’t going to happen. Both of you know that the two of you only have a handful of nights like this left. But it’s so much nicer to imagine this dream future, one where you and Kaidan walk hand in hand through the field you and Will used to spend hours in, where you are able to run your hands over the carvings you made into the old tree in front of your house, where you stand in the kitchen of your childhood home and remember every meal you had there.

And maybe you will get back home. Maybe you’ll survive, and the Crucible will work, and you’ll step off a ship and breath in the crisp air of the planet you called home for your first sixteen years. It’s a dream, but you’ve learned by now that some dreams become reality. It’s something to hang on to; it’s something to hope for. 

And you do. God, you hope for it.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the T.S Eliot poem "East Coker"
> 
> The style of this piece is way different than what I usually write, but I loved working on it! The second person is super fun to experiment with.
> 
> As always, comments and kudos are appreciated. Let me know what you think!


End file.
